Here is a little contemporary tale about fatherhood: Hank was a lumberjack, and a widower. He raised his only child, Kevin, alone, and even managed to finance his college education the only way he knew how, cutting down trees with an axe.
The Tragedy of the Fatherless
Kevin helped his father cut down some of those trees, so he knew how hard his father had to work to put him through college. When he left for college, Kevin promised himself that the first thing he would do once he graduated would be to buy his father a gift that would make the old man's life easier.
True to his word, when Kevin started his first job, he scrimped and saved until he had enough money to buy the finest chain saw in the world. He took it home in August, and as he presented it to his father, he said proudly, “From now on you'll be able to fell three times as many trees — and only work half as hard!”
Choking with pride, Hank said, “I've got the best son in the world!” Early next morning Kevin left for the city, and he wasn't able to return until Thanksgiving, three months later. He was shocked to see that his dad looked terrible: run down, thin and pale, short of breath, too exhausted even to jump up and hug his son.
“Dad! What's the matter?” Kevin asked. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Getting old, I guess,” Hank sighed. “Cutting trees is getting harder and harder. Even with this here new chain saw, I'm working longer hours than ever, but I'm still not cutting as many trees as I used to.”
“Gosh, Dad, that's awful!” Kevin knew that something must be seriously wrong. Either his father was desperately ill, or the saw he had given him wasn't as good as advertised. Maybe it was actually defective. To check it out, Kevin examined the oiler first, and found that it was full. Then he checked the gas, and that was full, too. So he yanked on the starter cord, and immediately the motor roared to life. His father leaped to his feet, grabbed him by the shirt and hollered, “What's that noise ??!!!”
This is an amusing story in the irreverent style of our times. We might call it the Dagwood style: the father is lovable but inept, well-meaning but not very bright. Wife, kids, everyone is smarter than he is, certainly his worldly-wise son. The perspective is typically adolescent, in just the way Mark Twain so famously illustrated: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in just seven years.
Demeaning as it is, the Dagwood image actually represents the sunnier, more affectionate side of the coin of paternal reputation these days. The disrepute in which fatherhood in general is held is probably unequaled since, oh, the Amazons. Did any previous society ever hear so many charges of unrelieved paternal dereliction, ranging from hideous brutality through callous neglect to mere human imperfection?
In one study recently published by the American Psychological Association, called “Deconstructing the Essential Father,” Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach propose that fathers are unnecessary for healthy child development — and could even be detrimental. Their study purports to show that fathers make no “unique” or “essential” contribution to child development. Indeed, fathers living in the home might actually strain the family budget by spending money on themselves. Children do need some “responsible, care taking” adult in their lives, the authors concede, but there is no reason why it need be their father.
Silverstein and Auerbach are scholars of highly impeachable objectivity; they frankly admit that their purpose in writing is to deny the validity of what they call the “neo-conservative defense of fatherhood,” in hope of influencing public policy to “support the legitimacy of diverse family structures” (such as single mothers, unmarried parents, or homosexual parents).
In reality, evidence supporting the importance of fathers is overwhelming, according to Wade Horn, director of the National Fatherhood Initiative, and former United States Commissioner for Children, Youth and Families. “If the authors can't find any empirical support for the value of fathers, it's because they aren't looking,” he said.
Chuck Colson, of Prison Fellowship Ministries says, “Through my prison ministry, I see firsthand the terrible price we pay for America's fatherless homes.”
Colson reports, for example, that boys who grow up without their fathers are at least twice as likely to end up in prison as boys with fathers in their homes. Sixty percent of rapists and 72% of adolescent murderers never knew or lived with their fathers. Adolescents raised without fathers are more apt to commit crimes, to abuse drugs, to conceive illegitimate children, live in poverty, drop out of school, and commit suicide.
The most eminent psychological and spiritual authorities on male homosexuality — such men as Fr. John Harvey, director of Courage, Dr. Charles Socarides and Dr. Joseph Nicolosi of NARTH, (the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality), and author Dr. Jeffrey Satinover — all identify dysfunctional family dynamics, especially in the father-son relationship, as the commonest root cause of homosexuality.
These dreadful statistics conceal no explanatory differences in class, race, or sex, either: white girls raised in affluence but without a father in the home are five times more likely than their peers to become sexually active, and pregnant out of wedlock, in their teens.
Growing up fatherless is a tragedy for children, and the tragedy is especially damaging if it occurs because the family was broken, or never formed. Children who lose their fathers through death know that he did not choose to leave them. Deserted children fear that their fathers do not value them at all.
Fatherhood Scorned
Yet it is not only delinquent fathers who are regarded with general scorn in our society. Even when no paternal pathology can be cited, even where fathers behave admirably, fatherhood has lost its gravitas. Even the Fatherhood of God.
His sacred name is casually, thoughtlessly taken in vain everywhere from the television screen to the school playground. Most media references imply not a figure commanding reverential awe but a large, distant Dagwood image. A Father? Well, yes, why not? But an unjudging, indulgent, doting Father, eager to please, grateful for any crumb of attention.
That is what many people seem to mean when they say, blithely, that His love for us is “unconditional” — as though we need not worry about maintaining our relationship with Him, because He won't hold our sins against us, He'll understand and overlook them.
The justly admired Dr. Herbert Ratner (who died in 1997) liked to say that life is hard because we have to live it forward but we can only understand it backward. Looking back, it is easy to see that the fatherhood crisis is part of a broader collapse of the family, in a society cut loose from its moral moorings. The elements of crisis also include decades of soaring divorce and illegitimacy rates, a pattern of mothers in the work force, and no one at home to raise the children.
With parents too distracted by employment pressures even to keep track of where they are, some troubled teenagers float away into the drug subculture, even onto the streets, eventually into prisons. Sadly gone from these cultural regions is the family integrity humorist Sam Levenson used to talk about, when “Papa made the living and Mama made it worth living.” Francis Cardinal Stafford, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, has said that the most acutely difficult cultural task for the new millennium will be to restore the family by socializing boys to be good husbands and fathers. That's most easily and effectively done in a healthy family supported by a strong, orderly, self-confident, doctrinally assertive Church.
We Women for Faith & Family know that fathers who abuse or abandon children are the minority among religiously active, married men. I know young men who want to marry and become fathers, but find that the young women they pursue — and sometimes catch — are only interested in transient liaisons, not in marriage and motherhood. And while there is much to deplore in society today, the young fathers I know best and see most are wonderfully involved in caring for their children and rebuilding a Catholic culture, at least within their own homes.
Most fathers are good men, who love their wives and children, and devote their lives to self-sacrificial service to provide for them, often by tedious work that is significant chiefly in that it supports their families. Their achievement is reflected in the infinitive, “to husband,” meaning “to care for, to preserve, to maintain.” Yet even the stable, two-parent family, centered on the nurture and education of children — especially the faith-rooted home-schooling family that I believe to be the best hope for the restoration of the Church and the nation — is viewed with bureaucratic suspicion for its “closed,” “outdated,” “repressive,” “possibly abusive” ” rigidity.” Sometimes even by agents of the Catholic bureaucracy.
The restoration of respect for fatherhood can only be achieved by the family and the Church working in cooperation — and not all the obstacles to that condition arise in the family. Part of the difficulty lies in the failure of many Church authorities to provide the strong, orderly, self-confident, doctrinally assertive support they need.
In its drive to elevate the status of women in the secular culture, feminism has stripped all virtue from any exclusively male activity. And while women may become firemen or fighter pilots or prison guards, there is really no way that they can become fathers. Hence fatherhood has been consigned to the museum — the ash heap? — of oppressive patriarchy.
Normal, trusting Catholics often find it hard to believe, but there are in the feminist camp employees of the Church — teachers, theologians, liturgists, editors, administrators, DREs — who see even the Fatherhood of God as an affront, because they blame all the world's evils on “a repressive patriarchy.” They do not brood in silence. For more than 30 years they have been active insurrectionists within Catholic institutions and dioceses, where many hold prominent positions.
“Our Father”: No Metaphor
At the parish level, the Church must enunciate unmistakably the theological reasons for calling God “Father.” She must make it clear that our Heavenly Father is not a giant Dagwood. She must teach the doctrine of the Trinity again and again, until all the bewildered faithful understand that the dogma of God's Fatherhood is not negotiable.
Most of what we say about God is metaphorical; certainly the terms that feminists like best are all metaphors, as when we say that God is like a rock, or a mother, or even a mother hen.
God is not a rock, though we use the word to mean that He is unchanging. He is not a mother, though we use the word in reference to His tender and faithful love, even more faithful than a mother's. He is certainly not a Mother Hen, but we use that term as a metaphor for His protective compassion: He would have gathered the children of Jerusalem under His (metaphorical) wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks to guard them from harm, but they would not. We use these figures of speech because God somehow resembles something that is characteristic of them, though He is of course much more than that resemblance.
All “feminine” references to God are figures of speech (“like a mother hen”). But when we speak of God as Father, the term is not a metaphor. Here the order of resemblance is reversed: His Fatherhood does not somehow resemble human fatherhood, rather human fatherhood bears some dim resemblance to God's full, perfect, Fatherhood. He is a Father. His is the original Fatherhood, and human fatherhood its partial, imperfect shadow, taking its name from that perfect, ultimate Divine Fatherhood. For the Son, the Eternal Word of God, is the perfect image of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God. In this eternal process of the Son from God the Father, the Father is only active, the One from whom the Son proceeds, and is in no way passive. He is in no way the one who “bears” the Son, and thus in no way the “mother” of the Son.
We also call God Father because of the life He originates outside Himself, when that life is an image, though imperfect, of His own substance. We are most certain of this because Jesus — who knows the truth in the most direct way possible — always calls Him “Father.” And when the Apostles asked Him how to pray, He taught them to say “Our Father.”
We know something about Him through the astonishing richness, complexity and variety of His Creation, but we know best what kind of Father He is because His Son told us what He is like: like the solicitous shepherd who leaves the main body of His flock to seek out a single lost sheep. Like the thrifty, persistent housewife who drops everything to search for one lost coin.
Incredibly, the Creator of the Universe is like the desolate Father who watches with longing for the return of a dissolute son, and when the son turns homeward at last, hungry and humiliated, the Father sees him while he is still a long way off, and comes out to embrace him. We call it the story of the prodigal son, but it is the Father who is truly prodigal in His welcome, celebrating the return of the lost sinner with joy, with lavish bounty, and without recriminations. With unconditional love, in fact.
Knowing that He really does love us unconditionally, we dare to ask His pardon and His healing grace. Knowing that He is also Perfect Justice, we understand that we cannot presume upon His mercy. Like Thomas Jefferson, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. If we are not in awe before His perfect Justice, His power and majesty, we are presumptuous fools. Yet we hope in the love of that Prodigal Father, the Father who withheld promised destruction from Nineveh when the people repented, and would have withheld His just punishment from Sodom at Abraham's plea if only ten just men could have been found there. If we do not love Him, spontaneously, in gratitude for His tenderness, and patience, and mercy, we must be spiritually blind and stony-hearted.
Christ told us how we are to live in a world where the brambles will always grow up together with the wheat: we are to be salt and light. We are to be like the mustard seed that grows to great size. We are to be like the yeast buried in three measures of flour, that leavens the whole society. And if we cannot, by teaching and loving example, convert all the sinners in our society, perhaps as He promised Abraham, He will still spare our nation for the sake of a remnant: we must be that remnant.
In this society oversupplied with lost sons and daughters, we pray He will also embrace us, restore Fatherhood and thus restore our families, and through them our corrupt culture.
Copyright © 2000 Women for Faith & Family
Donna Steichen is the author of Ungodly Rage and is a wife, mother and grandmother living in Ojai, California.
This article previously appeared in Voices, the journal of Women for Faith & Family, and is adapted by permission.
